Nell Haynes is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistic Anthropology at Northwestern University and affiliated faculty in the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Her research addresses themes of performance, authenticity, globalization, and gendered and ethnic identification in Latin America. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northwestern University in Anthropology and Theater. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at American University in 2013 with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Social Justice. Nell previously was a postdoctoral fellow at theCentro de Estudios Interculturales e Indígenas at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she published her first book, Social Media in Northern Chile. She is currently working on her second book, based on fieldwork in La Paz, Bolivia. The book explores how the pop culture spectacle of lucha libre featuring women as chola characters reflects and contributes to current debates over the nature of "authentic indigeneity" in Bolivia. Nell has also published in a number of edited and co-authored books, as well as prestigious academic journals.

​Check out my blog, written with Bolivian activist and scholar David Aruquipa Pérez, now published on Notches: Remarks on the History of Sexuality. We examine how political allegiances and competing priorities have shaped equality movements for LGBTI Bolivians, and thus, their histories.

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile.​In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.

This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the ethnographic research exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communicatin? Are we becoming mroe individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? ​How the World Changed Social Media argues that the only way to appreciate and understanding something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how peole all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.

latest news

1.12.2017 American Anthropological Association Conference panel on "Wrestling in the Trumpocene: Politics and Pro-Wrestling in the 2016 Campaign and Beyond with Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer, and Eero Laine.

19.09.2017 My long-awaited blog with David Aruquipa Pérez is up today on the Notches blog, examining examine how political allegiances and competing priorities have shaped equality movements for LGBTI Bolivians, and thus, their histories.

21.07.2017 Talk at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia. 19.00 hrs in the Anthropology Library. Open to the Public!

19.09.2017 My long-awaited blog with David Aruquipa Pérez is up today on the Notches blog, examining examine how political allegiances and competing priorities have shaped equality movements for LGBTI Bolivians, and thus, their histories.

21.07.2017 I will be giving a talk at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia. 19.00 hrs in the Anthropology Library. Open to the Public!